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Money, Kickstarter

4 years ago2,246 words

I want to talk a bit about money again: how much I'm earning each month, and how the amount that other indie games raise on Kickstarter does convince me to give that a go.

Here's a screenshot of an app I use that summarises income from my bank accounts:



The beautifully-named F/Flow Valve Corpo is apparently Steam, where MARDEK is still getting at least some sales per month, though it's dropped quite a lot since the start of the year. A shame, but I suppose it was never going to last. That and ∞ my Patreon ∞ are the main chunks of my small income. There's technically a Bandcamp sale there, but my overall Bandcamp sales (for the past 60 days) look like this:



Uploading those albums was always about archiving, not sales, so I'm more grateful there are more than zero sales than I'm disappointed they're so low, but this is a big reason why I've not exactly been prioritising uploading the others. I still want to since it's important to me personally to have a place for my music, but I know they won't sell, so I'll get to it when I get to it.

Some Calculations

I regularly see Americans on Reddit talking about money. Not their incomes usually - since it seems taboo to discuss them - but usually in terms of society or politics or something. I've seen the number $15/hour come up a few times as what the minimum wage either is or should be - I don't know - which got me wondering about how much I'm generating per hour doing what I do.

From what I understand, people might typically work for... is it 8 hours a day that's the norm? But I can't imagine most of that is focused work, as I've written about before. A big part of it for many jobs must just be being present in the workplace.

I aim to do 6 hours of focused work every weekday, and I use a self-made tool I've written about before to track this. Some days I exceed the 6 hour goal, but more often I fall short, sometimes very short. I'd estimate I do about 5 focused hours of work per day on average.

I try to take weekends off because working the same routine every single day wouldn't work, but I end up doing stuff like writing weekly updates or researching anyway, which takes time and which mean my mind's often on work. Still, let's say that doesn't count and I'm only working Monday to Friday.

A quick Google search suggests the average number of work days in a month is 21.

I earned £747.91 in April as seen in that image, but it's varied a lot through the months, so I should take the average. That'd be:

(£1164 + £1156 + £862 + £748) ÷ 4 = £982

So:

982 ÷ (21 * 5) = £9.35 per hour

Alternatively, I could also say that I'm technically 'at work' from 6am until, I don't know, 4pm? With an hour break for lunch (do 'normal jobs' include lunch hour as a paid work hour?). So that's 9 hours of work a day. That'd give:

982 ÷ (21 * 9) = £5.20 per hour

So depending on how you look at it, I'd estimate I'm earning somewhere between (converted to US dollars) $7 and $13 per hour doing this games thing.

I imagine you're very envious of my incredible wealth.

Other things worth considering

Americans seem to have ridiculous wages. I see numbers like $50k thrown around as if it's a low amount, and I remember seeing a Twitter discussion about hashtag-gamedev earnings a while back, where several Americans casually threw six-figure numbers around as if they were no big deal, or even disappointing. I vaguely remember writing a post about that and people replying, so maybe we've talked about this here before.

When I wrote about money at the start of the year, I realised that in 2021, I'd earned... £12,862, which converts to $17,841 US.

According to ∞ this article I quickly found ∞, the average UK yearly salary is £31,461 a year. But Google claims the average US yearly salary is $35,977? That's only around £26k.

Coming up with a singular 'average income' statistic isn't going to produce anything especially useful though. ∞ This article ∞ divides (US) incomes into tiers - Lower, Middle, and Upper - which are roughly around $25k, $80k, and $190k respectively. Absurdly different!

But I barely understand earnings stuff myself. I've only ever seen 'paychecks' mentioned online and have never received one since I've never been employed.

Something closer to my actual experience is the amount that government benefits might pay out if I had no income at all. The gov.uk website says I'd get £74.70 a week from that, so let's say £300 per month.

I am at least earning significantly more than that, so that's reassuring I suppose, but there seems to be quite a gulf between this minimum amount and what I'd earn for any 'real job'.

...I just tried to look up what the minimum wage was for the UK, but I couldn't see any convenient singular number anywhere. ∞ This thing ∞ mentions something like £8.91 per hour as the 'national living wage' - I think, and whatever that even is - which is slightly less than my calculation for if I count my work as 5 hours a day, and more if I use 9 hours. Hmm.

Kickstarter

I've been wondering whether to do a Kickstarter for a while, as I've talked about a few times before. A lot of the devs of in-progress indie games I'm following on Twitter have been doing Kickstarters - to the point where it feels like the norm - which lends weight to the idea I should do one too. I've been bookmarking them to see how they perform.

I know I've looked at specific Kickstarter performances and written about them in this blog before, but it seems to be buried at the end of weekly updates from months ago, so let's look at a few more now.

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∞ Here's one for an upcoming metroidvania called Haiku the Robot ∞. The dev tweets a lot, so I get the feeling he has a strong social media presence (I probably don't), and the game seems solid, so I thought - and hoped - it'd do okay at raising funding. The Kickstarter seems to have ended at least a couple of months ago, where "1,163 backers pledged £29,853 to help bring this project to life". That's decent!

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∞ Here's an ongoing one (22 days left) for a point-and-click game called Lucy Dreaming ∞ (I like that title). I've been curious about this one for a while since the dev isn't young, and I checked his blog once where he talked about asking players what they'd want to see from games since he hasn't really played any himself in years, which I could relate to. I thought maybe the genre, art style, and his maybe not being in touch with the gamer kids might lead the project to failure, but thankfully I see that it's already just hit its £15,000 goal in 8 days. Good to see! And very promising, too.

...Though the dev has a family and says he's been 'running [his] own creative agency with [his] wife for over 10 years', which I feel would give him an edge when it comes to selling himself, reaching out, that kind of thing. Plus having a stable home life would (hopefully) immunise him against many of the mental issues I'm struggling with myself.

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∞ Here's another ongoing one (16 days left) for another metroidvania called Zapling Bygone ∞. It's not my kind of thing, though I've seen it a few times on Twitter and thought its similarity to what I see other devs making probably hints at it appealing to the gamer demographic more than my games, maybe. The dev mentions having quit his job to work on it full time, though currently it's only at £5,840 of its (surprisingly low) £9,250 goal. I hope it'll reach it in time; it's got over two weeks!

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∞ Here's one for yet another metroidvania called Lone Fungus ∞, which to me seemed to have too little going for it to succeed... but which "858 backers pledged SEK 305,048 to help bring ... to life"; that's $36,073 US. A surprising amount! It describes itself as:



...Literally a list of games you might fondly remember playing before, with nothing about its own selling points. Brings to mind what I've written before about how the key to success seems to be in making something that reminds people of things they've enjoyed in their past, deviating into originality only slightly.

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I've got dozens of those bookmarked, but that's enough to get the point, I think. I probably should go down that path, and I think I might have some advantage due to the past success of MARDEK (many of these devs are making their first game and still succeed). But I know I'll need to do a ton of research specifically into Kickstarter before thinking about starting a campaign formally.

I should probably make that my next step once I've finished making changes to Atonal Dreams based on feedback. I notice that a lot of these Kickstarters have a long period where you can follow them before they actually launch, though, so I shouldn't delay too long if I am going to do one.



Here's another thing that's not exactly related to that, but which is related to money-making in general. I saw a tweet by Matt Roszak the other day mentioning ∞ a newly-released episode of something called Burnt Face Man ∞, by David Firth, one of the big names in the Flash scene a decade or so ago. I haven't watched it because I expect it to be unsettling in a way I feel I can't stomach quite as well these days as I could as a teenager (though I wonder whether cultural shifts have affected his art much), but from the preview it looks like his general style is the same as it was back then. It looks to be even reusing assets from the original episodes of that, many years ago.

I noticed he has ∞ A Patreon ∞, where he's got 1,394 patrons collectively donating an unspecified amount. Very impressive, though not surprising considering the name he made for himself in those communities back then. I've seen a few of the old creators still doing what they did like this, and getting supported for it, which makes me think a lot about my own hiding in a cave for years and coming back with stuff quite different to what I made in the past. The idea of not constantly growing and changing is something I probably couldn't manage, though I do wonder if I'd be much less financially insecure if I was just making MARDEK 8 now or something. But how long can you continue doing what you always did? There has to come a point where the bubble bursts... maybe. I don't know!

It's great that there's a platform where fans can support their old favourites though, and that some creators can continue doing what they do without having to give it all up to pay the bills.



In 2019, I earned something pathetic like £2000 in total, and in 2020 I earned just under £13k. I set myself the goal to earn £20k this year, and so far I've earned around £4000.

If I could earn at least £10k from Kickstarter, that'd be amazing! But it's not something I can just casually step into and hope for success. I still have a lot of social avoidance issues and inexperience in the whole marketing domain, so I'll need to devote myself wholly to researching how to run a Kickstarter for probably at least a couple of weeks before making one, rather than just giving myself an hour at the end of each work day to half-heartedly look into it. I need to finish the dev stuff I'm working on first though.

Looking at my income like this leaves me with mixed feelings. It can't compare to the big salaries of people in successful jobs, so that gets me down. But it's also a lot more than nothing, which is significant since it's so difficult making money purely from personal creative work. I'm by no means wealthy, but I do feel I'm on a hopeful path that could lead to financial security eventually... maybe.

Patreon is a big part in me getting there, so a huge thanks to those of you donating to me on that!

I don't have any particular interest in being rich, but at the moment I don't feel secure enough to move out into my own place, which is frustrating. If I could earn enough to get to that point, that'd be enough for me. It's a journey.

(I wrote this over a few days - I'm been very busy! - so some of the numbers are probably off at the time of posting.)